DESPITE A POSITIVE international window, it was two poor mistakes from Nathan Collins and Caoimhín Kelleher which caught the attention of David Sneyd, Gavin Cooney and Shane Keegan on the latest edition of The Football Family, the podcast for subscribers to The 42.

“It was the first minute of injury time against Greece there was still a chance to get a point in theory if we got a chance. But then that mistake happens,” Sneyd said.

“Kelleher done more than enough in that game to come out of it still being positive, but that’s going to leave a sick feeling for him.” 

Cooney added: “We’ve had these issues before. The one that leaps out to me is Josh Cullen’s square pass to Benjamin Pavard, who rifled it in from outside the box for France. The criticism them was more directed at the manger than the players, with the feeling being that they were being asked to do something that they couldn’t do.

“But I mean we see Kelleher playing for Liverpool and he’s very adept at waiting to be pressed and then popping the ball around the corner. So maybe it’s completely inexplicable that here’s a guy who can do it and does it all the time, but just couldn’t execute it correctly in that moment.

“It’s just the trend of the mistakes. Nathan Collins shouldn’t be making that error against Finland either. Maybe they’re inexplicable errors and you can never fully iron them out, but they do seem to happen to Ireland more often than not.

“I thought one of the ideas as to how to eliminate these really awful individual mistakes was to make the game plan more basic. And while we have made it a bit more basic, these errors are still happening. It would drive you mad,” Cooney said.

Keegan added: “Yeah, I’m not so sure that you can point at the game plan for the two errors in the last week. They are such basic passes. This was not Kelleher trying to play a pass while being extremely pressed under serious pressure and therefore should have just booted it. He had all the time in the world to play that pass correctly. Likewise, Nathan Collins against Finland.

“I look at Ipswich at the moment and I’m a big fan of Kieran McKenna. But they can’t keep doing what they are trying to do. They’re absolutely killing themselves. They are trying to play in really tight areas around their own 18-yard box and they don’t appear to have enough quality to do it. As a result, they’re creating goal-scoring opportunities for the opposition. 

“These Irish mistakes were different. That wasn’t how these two goals here came about. So, I wouldn’t be pointing the blame here at the manager. I also don’t know how the manager fixes it, apart from if we can play a game or two without making a mistake and it becomes a non-issue.”

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